Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

About ten years ago a guy named Hallowell showed up at the office one evening with a canvas zipper bag containing a hundred and fifty thousand simoleons in fifties and centuries, with which he intended to short-circuit an electric current of two thousand volts which Wolfe was arranging for him to take sitting down, but that was only chicken feed compared to this. And, considering the secluded nature of the transaction, no income tax. A million dollars would buy four million bottles of the best beer.

Wolfe was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, his lips pushing out and in, out and in again. I was gazing straight at Bruce’s face, impersonally, pondering the soundness of her assumption that Wolfe was worth a hundred times as much as me.

“I shouldn’t think,” the lovely innocent creature said in a matter-of-fact tone, “you would want to waste time on trivialities. Major Goodwin’s guess happens to be correct-I typed that poem on my portable, from a book I had borrowed, because I liked it. And I suppose- Would you care to tell me what you were comparing it with?”

Wolfe muttered, without opening his eyes, “A letter Mr. Shattuck received.”

She nodded. “Yes, that was typed on the same machine. And over thirty letters just like it, to different people in key positions. As you have doubtless already discovered, this affair is extremely complicated. It goes high, and it spreads wide. It really isn’t worthy of you, Mr. Wolfe, to be wasting your talents on little details like that letter and Colonel Ryder’s suitcase. We have been intending for some time to have a talk with you, awaiting the proper moment-and now of course you’ve forced us, with this suitcase business. We realize it will be very difficult to arrange. There will have to be mutual guarantees. Commitments of a kind that will make reconsideration impossible on either side. We’re ready to discuss it whenever you are.”

Wolfe’s eyelids raised enough to show slits. “I like your dismissing the suitcase as a triviality, Miss Bruce. But if that’s your whim- I suppose it would be futile for me to question you about it, or about this letter?”

“Such a waste of time,” she protested.